Parc del Laberint d'Horta

Horta's Labyrinth Park has the city's oldest conserved garden. Once Neocalssical, with a slightly Italian look, it later adopted a Romantic style.

Notice: From Tuesday 3rd November to Friday 2nd December, the acces to Maze will remain closed.

Every doubt is a labyrinth. Decisions, hypotheses and theories are paths for finding solutions, with every shortcut opening up a new point of view. Think about that as you try to work your way deep into the park’s labyrinth, made from wide, domesticated cypress hedges. If you reach the centre without finding the heart the park will have robbed you of, go and ask Eros where you can get it back. His sculpture stands smack in the middle of the labyrinth. Once you are back in the world, you can face the second challenge: Is this a Neoclassical or Romantic garden?

History

The park occupies the land of an estate once owned by the Marquis of Llupià, Poal and Alfarràs, a very enlightened man who gave the project to the Italian Domenico Bagutti, who worked on until 1808. A French gardener Delvalet was put in charge of the plantations, while the Catalan master builder Jaume Valls supervised the work. The Desvalls family remained the owners of the estate right up to the 1970s, when it was acquired by the City Council. It was officially opened as a public park in 1971. A complete overhaul followed in 1994 which changed its concept to that of a museum garden.

Biodiversity

Before you go into the heart of the park, you pass through the domestic garden, where you will find a lime tree (Tilia tomentosa) and a Himalayan cedar (Cedrus deodara) that are listed in the Barcelona Trees of Local Interest Catalogue. Nearby, there are European yews (Taxus baccata), laurel-leaved snail trees
(Cocculus laurifolius) and a Crape myrtle
(Lagerstroemia indica), as well as a plantation of camellias (Camellia).
If you decide to go to the small temples and the Neoclassical pavilion that dominates the park from above its three terraces, you will find a curious, or rather, rare alignment of holm oaks (Quercus ilex)) surrounded by a sweet bay tree (Laurus nobilis) hedge that offers you shade on your way round. There is also a coast redwood tree (Sequoia sempervirens) which is listed, like the holm oaks. If you take a detour along the other paths, you will find even more hundred-year-old holm oaks (Quercus Ilex) and African lilies (Agapanthus umbellatus).

You will also feel tempted to enter the labyrinth before you reach the small temples, thanks to its imposing cypress (Cupressus sempervirens) hedges. Like an island of peace, the majestic height of the trees surrounding the whole area, holm oaks (Quercus ilex), pine trees (Pinus halepensis and Pinus pinea) and oaks (Quercus robur), gives it an even more secluded ambience.
Once you have overcome the challenge, you can admire the little temples to the right and left of the labyrinth’s centre, along with the stairs and Neoclassical pavilion, also designed by Domenico Bagutti, on its central axis.
As you leave the labyrinth and walk up to the pavilion, you can follow the Romantic canal originally used by boats. Behind the pavilion there is a large garden pond which, thanks to the force of gravity it acquires from its position in the upper part of the garden, supplies all the water for the fountains and fountain jets lower down.
The water flow marks the connecting space between the two worlds of the park: the abrupt end to the canal turns the gently flowing water into a waterfall that leaves its previous path to become a stream.
This setting allows the vegetation to break with the established order up to that point and go wild. The route here takes you past a farmer’s shelter carved from the rock and a hermit’s wooden cabin, on a path surrounded by holm oaks (Quercus ilex), pine trees (Pinus pinea and Pinus canariensis) and abundant maquis shrubland containing Japanese spindle (Euonymus japonicus), laurustinuses (Viburnum tinus), sweet bays (Laurus nobilis) and cheesewoods (Pittosporum tobira) and Japanese barberries (Berberis thunbergii).
The climbing ivy (Hedera helix) there makes the most of this very humid and shaded environment.
As you make your way to the last stop, the false cemetery, you will find carpets of African lilies (Agapanthus umbellatus) along with scrubs made up of sword fern (Nephrolepis exaltata), boxwood (Buxus sempervirens) and butcher’s broom (Ruscus aculeatus). The largest trees here include European yews (Taxus baccata), sweet bays (Laurus nobilis), oaks (Quercus pubescens), manna ash trees (Fraxinus ornus), plane trees (Platanus x hispanica) and lime trees (Tilia europaea).

Landscaping and Design

The Laberint d’Horta park is actually a museum garden. This museum approach is reflected in the dual Neoclassical-Romantic route. A journey that begins at the Chinese gate, a relic of a long-gone oriental garden. It continues through the boxwood (Buxus sempervirens) garden, a secret garden that stays true to the original spirit of the Italian designer, landscape artist and gardener, Domenico Bagutti, who created this park for Antoni Desvalls, the Marquis of Llupià and Alfarràs. Paths emerge from this garden, the result of painstaking pruning, which lead to the small Ariadna and Danae temples, the domestic garden and the Romantic garden that takes up the entire left side of the park.

Art and Architecture

A Romantic or a Neoclassical garden? There are arguments for both. On the one hand, symmetry, topiary art and regular landscaping, small temples with Tuscan columns, fountains and fountain jets, sculptures based on mythology and a Neoclassical pavilion dedicated to the muses. On the other, the sound of the water falling freely into a waterfall and a stream over a stone bed, moss and forest plants, a wilder and shadier garden, covered in ivy and African lilies, an irregular layout of trees consisting of European yews, pine trees, plane trees and large lime trees and even a false cemetery. Orderly and whimsical greenery, nature tamed and free. These are the elements that mark out the various stages in the growth of a park originally created in the Neoclassical style, in 1791, but which grew and adopted the Romantic style in 1853.